Customer Relationship Management in Local Government Call Centers: For the Better or the Worse?

In the course of recent public sector reforms, an increasing number of public administrations implement IT based customer relationship management tools to improve services for their citizens. Among others, the creation of call centers should both lead to a better service at the front end and improve organizational processes for more efficiency and effectiveness. This paper evaluates the effects of CRM in call centers by focussing on three areas: equal treatment of customers, quality of individual services, and organisational processes. Based on four cases of local authorities in the UK, the study reveals that customer segmentation in the context of CRM was merely done to categorise citizens according to their channel preference and use. Segmentation in the public sector does not jeopardize the equal treatment of citizens, but aims to maximise access across different services. Standardised work design, however, was perceived as a loss of service quality by public managers. Finally, the local authorities' efforts to reorganise organisational processes by establishing front-end and back office units arose departmental resistance. As a result, the back office remained unaffected by the re-engineering efforts. Thus, joined-up service delivery supported by CRM remains more of an aspiration than being reality.